Where the Buck Stops

by Harry Truman

  Harding became president in 1921, and the rough stuff started to come out a year later. A man named Jesse Smith, who was one of Harding’s poker-playing friends and had the reputation of being the person to see if you wanted a job in government, and was so close to Harding and Daugherty that he once shared an apartment with Daugherty and split the rent and other costs, was suddenly suspected of taking bribes and a lot of other illegalities and was told to get out of the capital. Instead, he let himself into Daugherty’s apartment and shot himself to death. Then it became known that the Veterans Bureau had been selling war surplus items at far below cost and value and replacing many of the items at far above cost, and the Bureau’s attorney, Charles F. Cramer, another Harding pal who’d bought the President’s house when Harding left the Senate, also killed himself. Then the head of the Veterans Bureau, Charles R. Forbes, who was both another poker player at the Little Green House and a Medal of Honor winner in the First World War, was told to resign and in fact to take a nice long vacation in Europe.

  Albert Fall’s turn was next. Harding was off on a tour of the United States, trying to make speeches that would restore the public’s diminishing faith in his administration, when Mrs. Fall came to him and told him that her husband was suspected of accepting bribes for leasing oil fields, fields that were being held in reserve for naval use, to private oil companies. Fall was suspected of taking the bribes because he’d made big and expensive improvements on his properties in New Mexico even though he didn’t have any legitimate income other than his salary as secretary of the interior. This was, of course, the start of the Teapot Dome scandal, and Fall was subsequently indicted and arrested along with two oilmen, Harry F. Sinclair and E. L. Doheny, from whom Fall had apparently received nearly $500,000 in bribes. Fall went to jail, and Sinclair and Doheny were acquitted, but Sinclair also went to prison for six months for contempt of court.

  Then attention began to be turned toward Harding himself and toward Harry Daugherty, but this was diverted by Harding’s unexpected and continuing illness. He was still on his speaking tour and was on his way back from Alaska on July 27, 1923, when he became sick in Seattle from what his doctors thought was indigestion caused by eating too much crabmeat. He got better and went on to San Francisco, but came down with pneumonia there, and again his doctors said he was on his way to recovery when he died suddenly on August 2. He was in bed at the time, and his wife was reading to him, and the doctors were divided; some thought that indigestion in Seattle had really been a heart attack that had finally taken him off, and others thought a blood clot might have traveled to Harding’s brain. But a rumor began to grow and spread that Harding might even have been poisoned so that he wouldn’t testify about some of his present and former buddies, and the doctors finally asked for an autopsy so that it could be determined once and for all if there was any truth in the rumors, though they felt there probably wasn’t. Nobody ever found out for sure because Mrs. Harding wouldn’t allow the autopsy, and Harding was buried back in Marion, Ohio.

  The next year, with Calvin Coolidge now president, Charles R. Forbes, back from Europe, was indicted along with one of the executives of one of the companies he’d favored, John W. Thompson. The charges were bribery and conspiracy, and both men got two years. Then Daugherty, who was still attorney general, was asked why he hadn’t had a hand in developing prosecutions against all those poker friends of his, and when he wouldn’t appear before a Senate committee or give them any of his records, he was told to resign. Shortly afterwards, he was indicted along with a man named Thomas W. Miller, who had been the Alien Property Custodian. It had been discovered that a German-owned company that had been seized during the war had gotten a $7 million settlement, and it was believed that some top government people had gotten $400,000 of that money to allow the settlement. Daugherty took the Fifth Amendment and refused to testify, but hinted strongly that he was doing this only because he wanted to protect the reputation of the former president, and that Harding was also involved. Miller went to jail, but Daugherty got two hung juries in a row and wasn’t tried again.

  Harding was a man who didn’t really understand the responsibilities with which he was faced. I don’t enjoy one bit making detrimental remarks about a man who had been president of the United States, but he never did know what the presidency was all about. His work as a senator and as a newspaper publisher just didn’t seem to give him any insight into the job. I don’t think there’s any point in editorializing on the Teapot Dome scandal and the other scandals of the Harding administration, either. They speak for themselves. I’m not going to assess any blame to Harding personally for the scandals, but he didn’t seem to know anything about what had happened in the country before he became president, or at least didn’t pay much attention to it, and that always means trouble for any president who goes in without any background of the history of the United States. In Harding’s case, it was both the lack of knowledge of the history that went before him and lack of knowledge of how to use the powers that he had as president. I guess it was lack of knowledge and lack of capacity and lack of interest as well. You can translate that any way you want. He just wasn’t interested in anything except setting the country back to what it had been before World War I and having fun with his friends. Anyway, his administration left no lasting damage. At least, I hope not.

  Calvin Coolidge took over, of course, when Harding died in office. He was quite a character, and there are a lot of funny stories about him, but I guess pretty nearly the only thing I like about him are those stories. Otherwise, his ideas about being president were exactly in the same line as the president who preceded him. He believed that the less a president did, the better it was for the country, and I don’t agree with that at all. He sat with his feet in his desk drawer and did nothing. He just sat there and signed bills when they came up, and vetoed a few, and that’s all there was to it. Coolidge didn’t think the president ought to interfere in any way with the policies of the legislative branch, and yet the president is the man who makes policy, or should make policy, for the whole country.

  Coolidge’s entrance into national politics was his decision that the police strike in Boston was against government, and they couldn’t do it. That was what set him up in the whole thing. This took place in 1919, when the police wanted to form a union and affiliate themselves with the American Federation of Labor, and the mayor of Boston said they couldn’t, and the police responded by not showing up for work. As you can imagine, this brought on a lot of looting, and the mayor got into a panic and called Coolidge, who was governor of Massachusetts at the time, and Coolidge sent out the state militia and put a stop to the looting and the strike. I don’t think anyone will disagree with the fact that I’m very much pro-labor and always have been, but I thought that Coolidge was right in his stand regarding the Boston police back in 1919 and still do. When a man or woman takes the oath to support and defend the government of the United States or any of our governments within the United States, that’s his first loyalty. No union or anything else can have anything to do with it. I don’t think that a man or woman engaged in civil service or police protection has the right to strike. I don’t think anybody has the right to strike against his government, local or federal or anywhere else. The men and women have sworn to protect and defend their government, and that’s what they have to do. They have no other loyalty. And it isn’t true that civil servants have no protection if they can’t strike. That isn’t true because they have congressional and other representation that will protect their interests.

  In that sense, Coolidge’s beginning in national politics was as sound as it could be. He represented a viewpoint that the nation approved. And his own state approved. That’s the reason that the Republican Party eventually put him on the ticket as the candidate for vice president.

  Coolidge was born in Plymouth Notch, a little village in Vermont, on July 4, 1872. (He was the only president born on Independence Day, but the day had special, and sad, significa
nce for other presidents. Both John Adams and Thomas Jefferson died on July 4, 1826, and James Monroe died on July 4, 1831. In fact, you might say that the whole month of July was a sad one in the history of the American presidency: Zachary Taylor died on July 9, 1850, Martin Van Buren died on July 24, 1862, Andrew Johnson died on July 31, 1875, and Ulysses S. Grant died on July 23, 1885. And as I’ve mentioned earlier in this book, James A. Garfield was shot by Charles J. Guiteau on July 2, 1881, though he lingered on until September 19, and Warren Gamaliel Harding was first stricken on July 27, 1923, with the illness that carried him off on August 2. But that’s all pretty morbid, and let’s go back to Coolidge’s history.)

  Coolidge was born John Calvin Coolidge but didn’t like his first name and dropped it early in life. His father was the fairly prosperous owner of the general store in Plymouth Notch, and Coolidge had the ambition to get his education at Amherst, but he failed the entrance examination and had to take a year of study at St. Johnsbury Academy. On his second try, he made it, graduated from Amherst with honors, and then went on to practice law across the state line from Vermont in Northampton, Massachusetts. He entered politics in 1898, serving first on the Northampton City Council and then as city solicitor, then became a member of the state legislature, mayor of Northampton, state senator, lieutenant governor of Massachusetts, and finally governor.

  He wasn’t an especially outstanding politician: When he was city solicitor, for example, he held the office twice but was defeated when he tried for it a third time, and when he ran for governor in 1918, he was elected but got one of the smallest majorities in Massachusetts’ history, under 17,000 votes. But his action on the Boston strike put him on the national map, and Republicans began to think about him at their convention in Chicago in 1920 as a good possibility for the second spot. He wasn’t the first choice; the preference was for a man named Irvine L. Lenroot, a senator from Wisconsin. But Coolidge came to the convention as a favorite son of the delegation from Massachusetts, and then a delegate from Oregon nominated Coolidge for the vice-presidential spot, and Coolidge defeated Lenroot 674 to 146 and was elected with Harding.

  There’s an old joke that the vice president’s principal chore is to get up in the morning and ask how the president is feeling, and I guess that’s about all Coolidge did when Harding was still alive. And after he became president himself, he didn’t do a lot more. He received the news of Harding’s death just after midnight, got out of bed and awakened his father so that the senior Coolidge, who was a notary public, could administer the oath of office, and then both men went back to bed. And the new president then pretty much slept through the next six years, earning himself the reputation of the man who got more rest than any previous president.

  Congress passed a bill giving bonuses to the veterans of World War I; Coolidge vetoed it, and Congress had to go back to work and override his veto. I remember being angry at Coolidge and happy with the Congress on that one myself. Congress passed another bill increasing pensions for all veterans of all wars, and Coolidge vetoed that one, too, though this time his veto held. Congress passed a bill giving control and management of the big new power plant in the Tennessee Valley to the government, instead of turning it over to private companies as the friends of Big Business wanted, and Coolidge took care of that one with a pocket veto. (A pocket veto is where a president gets a bill within the last ten days of a congressional session and just puts it in a drawer and doesn’t do anything at all until Congress adjourns, so that this has the power of a veto without having to do any work to accomplish the veto. That kind of thing must have appealed mightily to Mr. Coolidge, accomplishment without work.)

  Then Congress tried to get a bill through that would give some relief to the farmers, who were suffering terribly in a period in which the rest of the country was enjoying prosperity. There was no longer the big demand for food products that had built up during the war years, so prices for farm products kept dropping lower and lower, while at the same time the things that farmers needed to operate, things like farm machinery and fertilizer, remained high because a tariff had been placed on these products during Harding’s administration. Farmers by the thousands began to lose their farms to banks when they couldn’t meet loans and mortgage payments, so Congress came up with the idea of shipping food goods at low prices to countries that really needed the food, and adding to the monies realized and giving farmers a fair profit with what was called a government “equalization fee.” Coolidge, however, vetoed the bill without suggesting anything to be put in its place. Congress tried again the next year, and Coolidge vetoed that one, too.

  These weren’t actions, of course; they were stopping or canceling actions. Despite this, Coolidge ran for the presidency himself in 1924, after he’d finished Harding’s term, and won. He was helped by the fact that the leading Democrats of the period were Governor Alfred E. Smith of New York and William G. McAdoo, the secretary of the treasury in Wilson’s cabinet, and Smith was a Catholic, which Americans weren’t ready to accept at that point in history, and McAdoo was rumored to have the support of men in the Ku Klux Klan. Coolidge was helped further by the fact that a third party, Theodore Roosevelt’s old Progressive Party, had been brought back to life with Senator Robert M. La Follette of Wisconsin as its candidate. In the end, neither A1 Smith nor McAdoo got the Democratic nomination; it went, after more than 100 ballots, to a sort of obscure Virginian, John W. Davis, who’d been our ambassador to Great Britain, and Coolidge beat both Davis and La Follette without much trouble. He got 15,718,211 votes to Davis’ 8,285,283 and Bob La Follette’s 4,031,289; 382 electoral votes to Davis’ 136 and La Follette’s puny thirteen. So he went back to sleep for four more years.

  I’m sure everybody remembers or has read about Coolidge’s famous statement in 1927, a one-sentence statement, which he handed to reporters when he was on vacation in August of that year in the Black Hills of South Dakota: “I do not choose to run for president in 1928.” I think he was always sorry that he made that statement, because he liked to live in the White House; I think he just wanted to be coaxed and was sure that he would be. But all the members of his own party were perfectly willing to take him literally at what he said, and he wasn’t renominated. He’d been perceived by his fellow Republicans and by other voters as a man of strength in the police strike, but he wasn’t really a man of strength. He just proved to be a man who met a situation when it appeared. But when it came to the point where things had to be done as president, I think that, if he’d been forced to do things, he would have, but he was never forced to do things while he was president. He just relaxed in the office of president and did nothing. Just like our Mr. Eisenhower. And General Grant as president.

  Coolidge turned up at the Republican convention in Kansas City all right, still expecting to be coaxed, and talking in a kind of not-too-nice way about Herbert Hoover, who was now the chief contender since Coolidge was supposedly out of the picture, as “that wonder boy.” But Hoover got the nomination on the first ballot, and Coolidge went home to Massachusetts and had a heart attack and died four years later, on January 5, 1933. He was not quite sixty-one years old.

  As I’ve said, there are a lot of good stories about Calvin Coolidge, and most of them deal with his dour conservatism, some of which take the form of just plain old stinginess. There’s one in particular that I’ve always remembered about a friend of his from Massachusetts staying all night in the White House, and this friend got up and had breakfast with Mrs. Coolidge and told her that he was a collector of cigar bands, and she told him to go on over and ask Coolidge for a cigar band. Coolidge always went over early to look through the mail and be sure he knew everything that was going on, and when this fellow arrived, he told the President what he wanted. The President took out his cigar box, took the band off one of the cigars, and handed it to the fellow. Then he put the cigar carefully back in the box.

  Another time, when Coolidge was governor of Massachusetts, another of his friends came to see him in Bosto
n. They sat and talked awhile, and Coolidge asked him if he would have a drink. He said he would, so Coolidge got out a couple of glasses and a bottle and he poured a drink for both of them and they had it. And they sat there talking after Coolidge had put the bottle and the glasses away. Pretty soon another member of the Coolidge court, as I think they called the fellows surrounding Coolidge up there, came in, and the fellow who’d come in first told the governor that he thought his friend would like to have a drink. Well, Coolidge got out a glass and the bottle and poured him a drink, and the second fellow said, “Doesn’t my friend want a drink?” Coolidge said, “No, he’s had one.”

  Coolidge was pretty good at saying things in a few words but making his point at the same time. When he stopped that police strike, he got an angry telegram from the head of the American Federation of Labor, Samuel Gompers, who argued that he wasn’t being fair to the police. Coolidge answered with a telegram of his own, but it was only one line long: “There is no right to strike against the public safety by anybody, anywhere, any time.” He was appalled by the things going on with the Harding gang, and when he took over the presidency, he gave his orders to prosecutors in a single sentence, too. “Let the guilty be punished,” he said. And since he didn’t like the idea of giving extensions to the Allied governments on the $10 billion we’d loaned them for rehabilitation after the First World War, he also shook off arguments with a single sentence: “They borrowed the money, didn’t they?”5

  And then there’s the time a man named Rupert Hughes wrote a debunking book on George Washington, and it was reported to Coolidge. He looked around and said, “Well, his monument is still there.” That’s the best answer to the debunkers. The debunkers of the early twenties showed up because it was a period of cynicism and people wanted something on which they could pin the notion that the greatest of the great were not as great as the historians pretended that they were. The main objective of some of the debunking writers, I suppose, was to give us a truthful approach, but it was overdone like everything else that gets into a groove of that sort.